Everyone is Switching to Mac!

June 02, 2007

.Mac is fickle sometimes. In just this week alone we've had 3 customers report problems syncing their keychain with .Mac accounts. So, I thought I'd share a little tutorial on the first step I always try when .Mac gets out-of-sync: Manually reset your .Mac keychain data with the correct data.

When .Mac refuses to sync, sometimes it just needs a little coaxing. The following steps will force .Mac to update its data to keychain from your one Mac and force .Mac to update the keychains on your other Mac.

As always, the first step before any change is to backup your information. The keychains are stored in this folder:

May 23, 2007

43 Folders had a post about Nocturne, a program that inverts your display colours. You can test this yourself before downloading by pressing CMD-option-ctrl-8, but Nocturne adds some additional preferences.

I've started using Nocturne to reduce my Terminal Illness. Once my eyes start to hurt I invert the screen to reduce my eye strain. I've found the white-on-black colour scheme perfect for reading mail, which I spend at least 2 hours a day doing.

May 14, 2007

In addition to doing support for 1Passwd, I still have a day job working for the "man" in the corporate world. They comprise two separate set of experiences and I often have to stop and reflect how different they are. Tonight, I got an e-mail from one of 1Passwd users who was new to the Mac world. He commented how friendly and helpful the Mac community is and what a difference there are between the two. As someone who made the switch in 2005, I can definitely relate to the feeling. The corporate world definitely represents the PC just like the new Apple ads reveal. (http://www.apple.com/getamac/)

The Mac community represents everything that is not corporate such as creativity, non-conformity, and striving to reach your best. It is great to be part of such a great community and I thank you all for making it so great. Finally, thanks to all the great 1Passwd customers who offer their heartfelt thoughts and ideas to us on a daily basis. You make a difference in people's life that a corporation could never do.

March 29, 2007

Every once in a while you find a document that cannot be deleted or a disk volume that cannot be ejected because the file is locked by a process that is currently running.

For example, yesterday one of our users could not eject the AllBookmarks disk image:

The best way to find what process is using this file is to use lsof command. For example,

lsof | grep AllBookmarks

The output will display a list of processes that a related to AllBookmarks:

As you can see in this picture, the process with id 913 is using the disk image volume. Now that you have the process id you can force this process to quit by using Activity Monitor application or simply by running kill 913 in the Terminal window.

March 23, 2007

I like Apple's Mail app, but it often slows down, and even beach balls. After every reinstall of OS X, Mail runs great, but it seems to start getting sluggish after a month or two. I've tried emptying the trash, and Rebuilding the mailbox, but those steps never returned Mail to its fresh install speed.

Today I decided to fix this without reinstalling the OS. First, I found that Mail keeps a huge cache folder (~/Library/Caches/Mail). I found thousands of files there:

find ~/Library/Caches/Mail/ | wc -l

2451

du -ch

21M total

2.5 thousand files that take up 21 Megs might not sound like much, but on a tiny and slow laptop hard disk, it makes a significant difference. It took over 30 seconds to delete the files, so it stands to reason when checking the cache for a hit, Mail would have to wait a long time for the disk to dig through these folders.

March 21, 2006

After a few weeks of waiting for MacBook Pro, I decided to cancel the order and go with the new iMac instead. I will still use the PowerBook G4 on the road but iMac is becoming my primary computer now. Intel iMac is my first desktop in 5 years and the first impressions are positive so far:

Fantastic, very bright 20” monitor

Comfortable full-size keyboard

4-button Mighty Mouse

The pre-installed software now includes Comic Life and Big Bang Board Games. Unfortunately, my favorite PowerBook G4 applications Art Directors Toolkit and OmniGraffle are not included.

Kids had fun with the built-in camera and the Photo Booth. I liked Apple Remote and Front Row.